Two Outside-the-Box Questions About Egypt

1. Due to a ban on cameras enforced by pro-Mubarak forces, CNN and MSNBC aired no video from Tahir Square last night. Though I didn’t check the major networks, presumably that was true of them as well. Yet they could have cobbled together videos from the cellphones of reporters or protesters, or, perhaps, from YouTube.

At the very least they could have worked out an agreement with other news sources and run arrays of still photographs. (The Daily Mail, of all news outlets, has been incomparable in its photographic coverage. Try these, for instance.)

Is the work of citizen journalists beneath them? If that’s the case, journalism is passing TV news by. Time may not be on Mubarak’s side, but neither would it seem to be on the side of TV news.

2. Doesn’t the Obama administration’s proposed plan to replace President Mubarak with Vice President — and former renditioner-in-chief as head of intelligence — Omar Suleiman remind you to some extent of a scenario in which Bush had been successfully impeached and then replaced by Cheney?

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We sniff out issues hiding in the foreign-policy forest and haul them back to the laboratory for inspection. We examine the anterior, posterior, and underside of an issue, as well as its shadows.

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